Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger launched Wikipedia on January 15, 2001, the latter[11] creating its name,[12] a portmanteau of wiki (the name of a type of collaborative website, from the Hawaiian word for "quick")[13] and encyclopedia.
Wikipedia's departure from the expert-driven style of encyclopedia-building and the presence of much unacademic content have received extensive attention in print media. In 2006, Time magazine recognized Wikipedia's participation in the rapid growth of online collaboration and interaction by millions of people around the world, in addition to YouTube, reddit, MySpace, and Facebook.[14] Wikipedia has also become known as a news source because of the rapid update of articles related to breaking news.[15][16][17]
The open nature of Wikipedia has led to various concerns, such as the quality of writing,[18] vandalism[19][20] and the accuracy of information. Some articles contain unverified or inconsistent information,[21] though a 2005 investigation in Nature showed that the 42 science articles they compared came close to the level of accuracy of Encyclopædia Britannica and had a similar rate of "serious errors".[22] Britannica replied that the study's methodology and conclusions were flawed.[23] With Wikipedia approaching five million edited articles in 2014, the last edition of Britannica contained approximately forty thousand articles by comparison, which is